


Where Home Is

by americanphancakes



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Professor!Phil, supportive Dan Howell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-17
Updated: 2019-05-17
Packaged: 2020-03-06 17:50:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18856030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/americanphancakes/pseuds/americanphancakes
Summary: Phil is an adjunct Linguistics professor. At what school, you ask? Well, right now, he's teaching at two schools somewhere in the middle of nowhere U.S.A. All he wants is to finally stop moving to a new city every school term and get a full time, tenure-track position... but it never seems to work out that way.Luckily, wherever he moves, Dan is right there with him. With dinner and back rubs.





	Where Home Is

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yikesola](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yikesola/gifts).



> It's like.... really hard to write a fic for one of your heroes lol  
> To yikesola: I hope this is to your liking. You deserve far better than I'm capable of writing, but I do think this is one of my best one-shots and I'm glad you were my recipient because it pushed me to do the absolute best I could. :)
> 
> My everlasting gratitude goes to danhedonia who was kind enough to beta for me at the eleventh hour. I sprinkle all the love and happiness upon you! I wouldn't have ended up so proud of this fic without your help and input. :D

A degree in Linguistics meant Phil Lester’s most likely career path was always going to be in academia. He’d chosen this degree for its perceived ease of receipt, and he hadn’t been wrong, since English had always been one of his stronger subjects. But as a member of the adult world trying to find a permanent teaching position, he found himself wishing he’d gone into a graduate program for film editing or special effects or something instead of getting teaching credentials.

 

It wasn’t too late to make a career switch, he thought to himself every now and then. Each time he had to pack up and move to a new university in a new city, he told himself there was still time. He was still young. He could get that film degree and make movies like he always wanted to. Maybe start with some independently produced mind-bending psycho-thriller that blew everyone’s mind and got his foot into Hollywood’s door.

 

But as soon as he was stood at the front of a lecture hall or classroom, rattling off interesting facts about etymology or grammar or dialects, teaching in that animated and excited way and watching students’ faces go from bored & sleepy to entertained & enraptured, he knew it was worth all the moving to do this job. He’d grown to love it. He just hadn’t grown to love his inability to find a full-time, permanent position. He hadn’t grown to love leaving every great batch of students he was fortunate enough to meet.

 

He’d never developed a specialty or particular academic focus like, say, sociolinguistics or English as a second language, so he was stuck teaching Intro to Linguistics or its equivalent at every school where he worked. And that also meant supply far exceeded demand for professors and lecturers at his level. It wasn’t long before he’d run out of schools in England with Linguistics programs who would hire him.

 

Now he was in his fourth American town, splitting his hours between two schools (one university and one community college), and he was exhausted. All he wanted was to stop moving. He felt restless, anxious, on-edge,  _ itchy. _ It had to stop. He needed to take root…  _ somewhere. _ Dan, his partner, had become similarly grumpy about the constant moving and Phil didn’t want him to be miserable anymore either. As fun as it was to travel from place to place and hear all the different dialects and speech patterns and terminology for everyday items, all Phil and Dan wanted was to feel like they had a base, somewhere to come home to.  _ It would at least be nice, _ he thought,  _ to fully unpack everything before being forced to move again. _

 

> _ house (n.) _
> 
> _ From proto-Germanic  _ **_hūsą_ ** _ (“dwelling,shelter”). _

 

So when the Linguistics department at the university had an opening for a full time tenure-track assistant professor, he jumped on the opportunity. He’d luckily gotten himself published recently, writing article after article about phonology and sociolinguistics when off the clock right after moving to the states. He submitted his student feedback from last term, which he’d hoped was at least good enough to get his adjunct contract with this school renewed. He wrote a passionate but professional letter expressing his intent to devote himself to the job.

 

And then, he waited.

 

> _ reside (v.) _
> 
> _ From Latin  _ **_resideo_ ** _ (“to  _ _ remain behind, dwell permanently”) _

 

He would sit and stare at the “Philip Lester, Adjunct Professor” title on the door to his shared office at the University, close one eye, and hold up a finger to cover up that first word so for a moment he could imagine it saying simply “Philip Lester, Professor.”

 

_ I should consider myself lucky I get an office here at all, _ he thought. It was certainly more than he’d gotten at several other schools.

 

He sighed and looked at the clock. It was nearly 8:00 PM. He’d gotten to the University at 7:30 that morning, too. Hours were long when you had to read hundreds of papers from students in nearly a dozen classes across two different schools. But he loved reading them. Most of the time, their young student-brains would see patterns he hadn’t, would have thoughts he didn’t have anymore, would make connections he couldn’t. He learned as much from them as they learned from him. But at that particular moment, Phil’s brain was turning to mush and he had to get out.

 

He began packing his rolling file with papers he still had to evaluate when he heard three soft knocks. He looked up towards the open door to see Dan.

 

“You work too late, old man,” Dan said. He was smirking in that particular way that only he did; the way that Phil found more comforting than sarcastic.

 

“Yeah,” Phil said. “I know. I just saw the time. I hadn’t realized it’d got this late.”

 

“You can stay if you need to. I brought dinner.” Dan reached into the cooler bag hanging from his shoulder and pulled out a plate wrapped in cellophane in a slapdash way that made the wrinkles obscure the food (which was definitely healthier than anything Phil would have chosen for himself).

 

“You’re wonderful,” Phil said. “I really was just about to head home though. I need to get out of the office.” He looked around the room, noting the shelves of paper and books -- half of which weren’t even his -- and the piles of student writing and the inbox full of paperwork he was behind on. The walls on his side were barren, having gone undecorated just in case he needed to leave again. The walls on the other side (belonging to an English professor, also adjunct faculty) were covered in Sunday paper comic clippings and “motivational” internet memes from about 2008. Phil hated them.

 

“Let’s go for a walk then,” Dan suggested. “Sneak over to one of the pubs across the street.”

 

Phil smiled. “And yell over everyone to talk to you?”

 

“Who says we have to talk?” Dan said. “You look like you need a drink. Plus, imagine if you ran into a student over there. They’d get such a kick out of their lame old professor getting a drink after hours.”

 

Phil shook his head, but acquiesced after a moment with a smile. “You’re a monster.”

 

“You love it. Come on!”

 

***

 

Ultimately, Phil did not encounter any of his own students, but the pub in question was indeed thronged with humans in their early 20s (and some who appeared to perhaps have come in with falsified identification). This did Phil no favors as far as feeling like an “old man,” as Dan affectionately called him on the regular, whose time to get a permanent career going seemed to be running out. Phil’s face was expressionless and tired; his mind was elsewhere. For all intents and purposes, Dan was sitting alone at the bar.

 

“You okay?” Dan asked, yelling to be heard over the music and talkative patrons.

 

“Yeah,” Phil said, but of course what he really meant was “no, I’m stressed out about work, but it’s nothing you haven’t already heard, and I don’t think it would be productive to rant about it again, and besides it would probably just annoy you.”

 

Luckily, the latter is what Dan heard. That was enough to convince him that Phil was exhausted and in need of rest rather than alcohol, and that they should duck out early.

 

After a quick stop at Phil’s office to grab his rolling file and the suit jacket draped over the back of his chair, they headed back to their rental house. They’d only signed a one-year lease, expecting that they’d need to move, which made the rent more expensive than it (or a mortgage) would have ordinarily been. To counter that, they lived in the sort of area most folks would call “the middle of nowhere.” Places to live that were conveniently near enough to both the University and the community college seemed to only come in two varieties - “city” and “the middle of nowhere.” There were no mass-manufactured and heavily-landscaped suburbs in the area, nor were there any charming small towns with farmers’ markets. There was the city (where the University was), and immediately on any side of it there was absolutely nothing. Where Dan and Phil lived was just such a Nothing. Their “town” consisted of fields of rolled-up hay, a DQ that was always bustling with active chattering teenagers because there was literally nothing else to do, a grocery store, and a massively overpriced gas station. One solitary traffic light could be found at this Nothing’s only crossroad, and most residents could remember how delighted they were when it was installed.

 

For some reason, the town also had fiber optic internet, which was all Dan and Phil really needed.

 

The house had been fully furnished when they moved in, and despite the very country surroundings, the decor within had been quite modern. Dan’s theory was that the property owners in the town were trying to bring in residents that weren’t closer to death than they were to the threshold of legal adulthood. Indeed, Dan and Phil stood out in this area not just for being English, and a gay couple, but also for being younger than 50. Most of the residents of the town were kind though. Having heard horror stories of people in rural America being judgmental and violent, the two had been pleasantly surprised by the open-mindedness they’d found in their tiny town. (Well, except for old Mrs. Houghton, who sneered at them whenever she saw them. Her son, a kind man in his 40s who took care of her, was constantly apologizing on her behalf.)

 

> _ settle (v.) _
> 
> _ From Old English  _ **_setlan_ ** _ (“to seat, to put to rest”) and Old English  _ **_seht, saht_ ** _ (“agreement, reconciliation, peace”) _

 

Dan and Phil felt safe here. They had high-speed internet and each other, and if this ended up becoming their permanent home then that was more than fine with them.

 

Phil marched straight to the bedroom as soon as they got back to the house. It was barely 10:00, and it wasn’t that he was sleepy  _ per se, _ but he needed to feel the comfort of his bed and the quiet of that room. Dan followed him, silently, letting Phil have his space.

 

Phil sat on the bed, lacking the energy even to lie down, and slouched with his elbows on his knees and his tie dangling limply.

 

Dan stood by the door and looked at his partner, the love of his life, the reason he was living out here in the middle of nowhere. 

 

Phil took pride in the positive atmosphere he created at the University. He left his stress, anxiety, and doubt at the door and taught with passion, trying to keep his students interested in the material rather than turning it into a chore. He tried to sound like he was having fun even on days when he wanted to collapse and cry from stress and fatigue. His students always loved him, everywhere he taught, which he expected would one day pay off in the form of a full-time job or at least a renewed contract. But it never did.

 

Today, he’d yet again ignored his anxiety and exhaustion through class after class and not given it room to breathe. And he was paying for it. His bones ached and his muscles were sore and his brain was foggy and this was all made worse by the fact that his diminished mental state was putting him behind on grading.

 

He was just so tired.

 

Dan finally climbed onto the bed and knelt behind him. He dug his thumbs into Phil’s upper back, eliciting a moan.

 

“You’re the best,” Phil said. His voice sounded strained but his face betrayed how relaxed he suddenly felt.

 

Dan chuckled and kept massaging Phil’s upper back and shoulders. “Here,” he said, “sit up a bit straighter so I can feel where it’s bad.”

 

Phil did as instructed and Dan pushed his knuckles into a particularly troublesome area. 

 

“Oh my god,” Phil groaned.

 

“Does it hurt?”

 

“Yeah but like, in a good way.”

 

“‘M not surprised. Feels like you’re made of rocks. Jesus!” Dan found himself wincing sympathetically in the face of Phil’s back pain.

 

“I didn’t even realize it’d got this bad,” Phil groaned.

 

“You really need to learn to call it a day earlier.”

 

“What I need is to stop slouching.”

 

“Yeah, that too,” Dan said, still digging his knuckles and fingertips into Phil’s soft skin to get at the tough knots underneath. “Didn’t feel like I had a right to say anything, though.”

 

“Yeah, both of us have shit posture.”

 

“Language, professor!”

 

Phil sighed and began to slouch again. “Professor, huh.”

 

Dan stopped massaging and crawled over to sit beside Phil. “Yeah,” he said reassuringly.

 

Phil shook his head. “It just feels like it’s never going to happen.”

 

“It will,” Dan whispered, taking Phil’s hand and lacing their fingers together. “You’re amazing at what you do. Your articles are actually good -- I don’t know how you made Phonology interesting that one time, but you fucking did. Your students love you. Eventually some school will see how valuable you are and they’ll know it’s the right move to keep you.”

 

“I applied here. At the University, I mean.”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Yeah. Haven’t heard back yet, but…” Phil sighed wistfully, then glanced around the room, taking in his surroundings. “I  _ like _ it here. More than I thought I would. Certainly more than I liked South Carolina.”

 

“Ugh, I know, right? That town was awful.”

 

Phil chuckled. “Yeah. Honestly I… I saw the school there had an opening and I didn’t even apply.”

 

Dan snickered in response. “But you like it here?” he asked.

 

“Yeah. I’m really hoping I get this one. I mean, the ideal would be a school back home. Er… you know what I mean.”

 

Dan smiled a tiny, soft smile and squeezed Phil’s hand ever so slightly. “You’ll get it.”

 

“Do you think so?” Phil asked, like a child who needed his mother to tell him there are no monsters under the bed.

 

“I know so,” Dan replied. Then he took a breath and spoke less gently. “I mean, realistically, I have no idea, but… I don’t know. I feel like you’ve got the experience at this point. I don’t know that you’ll  _ get _ it, but I do know you deserve it.”

 

Phil was genuinely reassured by Dan’s realism. This wasn’t empty praise or naive optimism. Phil didn’t need that right now. What he needed was realistic hope, and Dan, cynical as he was, had provided nothing less.

 

“Thanks,” Phil said.

 

Dan knelt next to Phil and kissed him sweetly, lovingly,  _ slowly. _ Phil put a hand on Dan’s lower back to pull him in closer. It was too short a time before Dan ended the kiss with two or three sweet pecks, and their foreheads rested against each other.

 

“I love you,” Dan whispered. “No matter what.”

 

“I love you, too.”

 

Dan kissed Phil again in response.

 

They made love that night, and Phil found himself very grateful for the back massage, because without it he might not have been able to enjoy the experience so fully. Dan fell asleep much sooner than he did, his mouth hanging open adorably. Usually Phil was the one to fall asleep first, so he had only recently learned that Dan snored. When he was younger, Phil had always thought a snoring partner would be annoying, that it would keep him awake, but the steady sound was less like a faulty car engine and more like the purr of a cat. The sound reminded him that Dan was there, and was breathing, and felt safe enough to sleep there with him. It was even and predictable and quiet enough to not startle Phil every time he heard it. It was reassuring. Eventually, Phil was able to close his eyes, lulled to sleep by the slow, rhythmic purr of the giant, warm human cat next to him. He dreamt that night of having a family. And a corgi.

 

***

 

> _ home (n., English) _
> 
> _ From Old English ham (“village, manor, dwelling, region”). _
> 
>  
> 
> _ home (adv., Esperanto) _
> 
> _ “humanly” _
> 
>  
> 
> _ homme (n., French) _
> 
> _ “man” _
> 
>  
> 
> _ homem (n., Portuguese) _
> 
> _ “human being, adult male human” _

 

Phil stared at the letter, the tears in his eyes distorting and warping the words. He wiped the tears away and read the opening sentence over and over and over again. He couldn’t stop himself.

 

_ We are delighted to inform you… _

 

Dan came into the dining room to see Phil stifling sobs, a hand over his mouth, sniffling loudly. Sure it had been bad news again, Dan sat down catty-corner from him at their large square table and reached out to hold his hand, as he usually did.

 

“It’s okay,” Dan said.

 

Phil shook his head. “No,” he said, finally smiling. “I mean, yes, yes, it’s okay. Because look!” He held up the letter.

 

Dan read the first sentence and skimmed it for keywords. He saw  _ ‘delighted.’  _ And  _ ‘full time.’  _ And  _ ‘Assistant Professor.’ _ His face slowly morphed into the brightest grin he’d sported in months, maybe years, and then he, too, was tearing up. “Oh my god, Phil!”

 

Phil nodded, still beaming, his eyes wet and his face red. He and Dan stood and hugged each other tightly, united in the peace and excitement they both felt. Suddenly, he wasn’t just sniffling and wet-cheeked anymore. He exploded with a burst of joyful and relieved sobs, the dam finally breaking when it really hit him that  _ they didn’t have to move again. _ After this term, he wouldn’t have to work at two schools just to make enough money to live on. He wouldn’t have to feel guilty dragging Dan all over creation as he moved from job to job. They could stay here. Finally. Maybe he really could get a dog! Maybe they could adopt a kid! Phil let himself bask in the daydream for just a moment before reluctantly returning to the present, where Dan was. He caught himself laughing deliriously, scarcely able to believe the nightmarish itinerant life he’d been living was finally over.

 

“We don’t have to move,” he said, his voice muffled by the fabric of Dan’s shirt. “We’re done.”

 

“We’re done,” Dan repeated, the smile audible in his voice. “I’m so proud of you.”

 

“I’m so sorry this took so long, Dan,” Phil said, pulling back from the hug. He looked Dan in the eyes. “I know you hate moving so much, and I am so grateful that you’ve kept following me through all this. All I ever wanted was for you to be happy, and to feel like… like you were at home somewhere. Somewhere permanent, you know?”

 

“First of all, you have nothing to apologize for,” Dan said frankly. “You work really hard. Always have. I never thought you weren’t doing your best. When you got pissed off at the schools for not renewing or not hiring you, I was pissed off at the schools right along with you! I never blamed you for that.”

 

“I know,” Phil sighed. 

 

“And I wasn’t following you. You weren’t pulling me by a leash or anything. I was coming  _ with _ you, not chasing after you or being dragged around against my will. I came with you because I love you and I wanted to.”

 

Phil smiled bitterly. “I just wished I could have found us a proper home sooner, I guess.”

 

Dan couldn’t help but laugh. “Phil, this was already home! And so was South Carolina, and so was Connecticut, and so was New York, and everywhere we lived back in the U.K. too. Because I had you. And you had me. I don’t need anything more than that for someplace to be  _ home. _ I’m sorry if I ever made you feel otherwise.”

 

Phil sniffled. “You’re being so cheesy right now,” he said with a giggle.

 

“Yeah, well, you’re being a drama queen,” Dan said with a grin. “Finally got the job of your dreams, and you’re dwelling on shit that you didn’t even fuck up on? For fuck’s sake, Phil.” He gave in to the urge to laugh.

 

Phil smiled back.

 

“I know the moving was hard on you,” Dan continued with a calm, affirming nod. “It was hard on me, too.”

 

“Oh, I know,” Phil said. “Believe me, I know!”

 

“Shut up,” Dan said, trying to hold back a giggle. “I’m trying to be all heartfelt here!”

 

“Okay, okay, sorry.”

 

“Anyway,” Dan finished. “There were definitely times when moving so much really, like… it felt heavy, you know? I would just be on edge every term, every semester, waiting to hear if we were going to have to move again. I won’t deny that. Not having to move is going to be really, really nice. But… Phil, we could be wanderers with no address, moving from cave to cave, carrying everything we owned on our backs and constantly evading, like… I don’t know, dinosaurs that were trying to eat us or something. And yeah, that would be stressful! But if we had each other, I’d still be happy. Sure, I’d be on edge, and I’d hate everything, but deep down underneath my constant bitching I’d be happy.”

 

Phil laughed. “You’re some kind of crazy person.”

 

“Yes, but I’m your crazy person.”

 

“Yeah, you are.”

 

 

 

> _ Tell me how it feels up there _
> 
> _ Tell me that they love you like I love you _
> 
>  
> 
> _ When the sun comes up and the silence comes... _
> 
> _ Tell me that you know I’m here _
> 
> _ Tell me that you love me like I love you. _
> 
>  
> 
> _ Every night you come back to me, every night I forgive _
> 
> _ That’s what it means, that’s what it means to be where home is. _

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Title & ending lyrics from ["Where Home Is" by MIYAVI feat. Melody.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1YztQXzaCI)


End file.
